


Heart of Kyber

by Deafen_the_Satellites



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Leia is one with the Force, Lower the Starbird to half mast, Teach us how to say goodbye, The Force is with her, The Resistance knows how to hold a funeral, stormpilot if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 08:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9115753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deafen_the_Satellites/pseuds/Deafen_the_Satellites
Summary: "The strongest stars have hearts of kyber."A galaxy comes together for the funeral of a general, a princess, and a sister.Rebels never die.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Edited by [Femme_Daltia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femme_Daltia), my partner in crime, the Baze Malbus to my Chirrut Imwe. We really have relied on the Force during fencing training. She is responsible for some truly beautiful language in this story.

Rey is meditating on the cliff-side when she feels it. A tremor, like an earthquake far away, but carried on the air, more in her blood than in the ground. It’s new and strange.  But it feels familiar, like deja vu. She’s felt similar tremors from time to time but never had a context for them. She tries to follow the sensation back to its epicenter, but she's too inexperienced to have much success. She gets up and brushes herself off and heads back to the hive shaped cell Luke calls home. 

She finds him sitting in silence, staring out over the smoky remains of a fire. He doesn’t react when she enters only asks in a monotone, “Did you feel it?”

“Yes,” she replies, not moving from the doorway. “What was-?”

“One strong in the Force is gone” he says quietly. There are tears on his face.

* * *

Far across the galaxy, Kylo Ren lets out a howl and lays waste to his chambers on a First Order starship.  No one goes near him to investigate. Most give him a wide berth even on a good day, as his tantrums are legendary. Although none come to bear witness to the ruin of his hands, cut open from the detritus of his surroundings, burnt from where his gripped slipped on his lightsaber, it’s clear something terrible has happened. Even General Hux finds an excuse to avoid interacting with Ren for days.  

It takes the First Order days to understand why.  Their intelligence isn’t nearly as good as they think it is. 

A lone aide is sent with a tray of food to leave outside the door. He’s supposed to use the intercom to tell Ren it’s there but he has better sense. Before he creeps away, he pauses. A sound he can only describe as _keening_ drifts under the door. He keeps this to himself.

* * *

A small comfort, she didn’t suffer long.  The slow, drawn out decline of old age and infirmity wouldn’t have suited her. She had spent too many years of her life tearing through the galaxy, blaster and com in hand. She would never have gone gently into that good night.

General Leia Organa, last of the House of Alderaan, daughter of Padmé Amidala of Naboo, one of two heirs to the Skywalker name, is dead.

Born to the Rebellion in more ways than one, she leaves a legacy as rich and wide as the galaxy itself. 

 _“Dianoga exterminated.  Repeat, Dianoga exterminated.”_ The call rings out over Resistance transmitters, picked up in fighter craft, on starships, through rusted wirelesses in cantinas and sleek, hidden radios in personal apartments. 

If you don’t know who Dianoga is, you aren’t worth alerting in a hurry.  No one recalls anymore why the General’s codename was Dianoga. It’s said old Solo chose it. Found it amusing to name her after a disgusting creature known to inhabit trash compactors and processing plants.  Even during the years she wasn’t speaking to Solo, a soft smile crept onto the General’s face when she heard her codename. 

She was funny like that. 

* * *

It’s as if time stands still. The call comes in to their outpost, on a small moon beyond Malastare, and Finn watches as everyone just stops, the tasks of the moment forgotten.  No one moves or says anything for a long while. 

Finn glances over to Poe, standing on top of an x-wing, wrench in hand.  He had been fixing the latch on the craft’s canopy.  Poe closes his eyes and just breathes for a moment.  He then sighs, shrugs his shoulders back, opens his eyes and announces,

“Alright. Everyone back to work. We need to finish these repairs stat and be prepared to move out at the next call.  Let’s go!”  

Finn returns to soldering connectors to dashboard instrumentation.  He scarcely knew the General but her death has sucked all the air out of the room.  It’s different now, the Resistance is never going to be the same. 

Late that night he finds Poe sitting outside the west hanger, looking at the stars.  The shuddering of the rusting generator muffles the sound of his crying.  Poe was born on Yavin IV after all. He grew up hearing stories of the General, long before she was a general, back when she had first blasted her way into the Rebellion’s hearts, after she had watched her homeworld destroyed and had never, ever stopped kicking.  He’s looked up to her as long as he can remember. 

Finn hesitates for a moment, then sits on the ground beside him and throws an arm over his shoulder.  Poe leans into his embrace. Finn hears a concerned warbling beep and turns his head to see BB-8 at his knee.

“Yeah, c’mere.” He says to the droid. BB-8 rolls around to nestle alongside Poe’s other side. Poe laugh-snuffles and wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

 They stay like that awhile. 

* * *

Considering they are an extra-governmental faction, on the run from the First Order, it’s one hell of a funeral.  Turns out a lot of people were tuned into that frequency or had trustworthy contacts keeping an ear out for news.  The Great Hall on Yavin IV, in the biggest of the former temples, is packed full of people from every corner of the galaxy. 

Rey shadows Luke, straining her neck to locate Finn or anyone else she recognizes.  She sees a familiar pilot - Jess Pava?  She thinks that’s her name.  She asks Jess if she’s seen Finn or Poe and is directed to them, standing with another clump of pilots.  Rey leads Luke over and introduces him to her friends.  Luke watches her embrace Finn and Poe, the three of them slightly giggly despite the somber occasion.  He smiles sadly, reliving a scene from long ago, now gone forever. 

Luke leaves the young ones to catch up with each other.  He drifts through the crowd, accepting condolences as the last living Skywalker.  The last member of the Old Guard. 

There are a few elderly Alderaanians and their descendants, those who had been off world at the time of the Destruction.  They wear ceremonial white.  To them, Leia will always be their Princess, daughter of Bail and Breha, last of the House of Alderaan. 

A few rows behind them, a woman rises to shake Luke’s hand.  They haven’t met before but she’s with a group of former refugees, zealously devoted to the Rebel cause after the destruction of Jedha City swiftly rendered the atmosphere of their entire planet unsustainable for most forms of life.  The survivors of Jedha and Alderaan typically travel to diplomatic events such as this together, bound by a similar history. Even though she never set foot on that far distant moon, Leia is held as much a daughter of Jedha as she is of Alderaan. 

An older Twi’lek, still graceful, approaches him. He doesn’t recognize her name when she introduces herself but she says she was once a dancer in Jabba’s palace.  She never forgot Leia-the-Hutt-Slayer who strangled Jabba with the very chains he bound her with. 

“Most of us died for the pleasure of that disgusting gangster.  The General killed him, saving the rest of us.” 

A contingent of Ewoks is ushered to the front so they can see the proceedings without having to climb chairs and each other.  A small clump of Bothans sits midway through the crowd.  It may be the Resistance now, but the Bothans haven’t forgotten the first Rebellion. 

C-3PO is shinier than he has been in years, although the red arm is still a glaring incongruence. The prim and proper droid seems to have adapted, no longer bemoaning the mismatch. Occasionally, the universe is still capable of surprising Luke.  In fact, here, amidst the press and clamor of the gathered, grieving assembly, C-3PO is in his element; protocol droids were made for easing the transitions in crises such as these.  He directs attendees to their seats with an easy grace, his chatter reassuringly unobtrusive. 

This doesn’t mean C-3PO isn’t devastated. It just means he won’t show it to Luke under these circumstances. That he's actually doing what he was built for, without comment, complaint or judgment, is evidence enough as to how hard this is for the droid.

Lando Calrissian claps him on the shoulder. He’s as suave as ever, still has a horse in every race, running multiple business ventures, still improbably straddling both sides of the law. But for the first time, Luke realizes just how much age seems to weigh on him. How much it weighs on them all.   

Well, Chewie hasn’t yet had the decency to even go grey yet. But the lifespans of Wookies are interminate compared to those of humans so it can’t be helped.  Chewie’s eyes are wet and Luke hugs him, trying not to cry before the ceremony starts.  There are few things in the entire galaxy more heart rendering than a grieving Wookie. 

The ceremony begins and the room goes silent.  Words are said.  Luke barely hears them. He climbs up to the dias at one point.  Says something short and inadequate. His mind is elsewhere, recalling the first time he looked out onto an assembly from this very spot, many years ago, a medal around his neck.  It had been worth it, all the years in between. The joy and the grief.  He still feels like he failed his sister, couldn’t save her only child the same way he couldn’t save their father. Or maybe he did save him. From a certain perspective. 

Perhaps there is still hope for Ben.  

Hope is a tenacious thing after all.  Leia taught had him that. He and Leia had embodied hope from the moment of their birth, when their strange narratives intertwined with the Force forever. 

Once, a lifetime ago it now seems, he had prepared himself to die. Had left her behind while he'd gone ahead; had told her, desperate and beseeching, “If I don't make it back, you're the only hope for the Alliance.” Now he is the one who remains behind while his sister ventures alone into the unknown. He supposes it is only fitting. He had retired and disappeared into self-imposed exile like old Ben before him while Leia had never slowed down, had kept hope alive in his absence.  She had defied her naysayers and his. She had known who she was with a rock-steady certainty and had pushed back against the darkness inch by inch until she had carved out a space big enough for herself and the cause. 

He could almost laugh at his egotism that night on Endor. As if Leia being the hope for the Alliance was ever conditional upon his success or failure. She’d been in the thick of the fight while he'd still been kicking dust through Beggar’s Canyon, naive and oblivious to the larger world around him. And even after the Empire had splintered into jagged pieces, she had kept fighting. When the Senate was re-instated, she had kept the Alliance forces from being absorbed fully into the new Republic, convinced that victory could never be so easy, that the work of the Resistance was not done. As if an Empire built over decades could be obliterated overnight.

If there was ever any question of her being the hope for a free galaxy, well, those in attendance today were evidence of her success. No one would abandon the cause now. It would be an embarrassment, a dishonor to her memory.

The Force, having rallied so many to her side, was at last finished with Leia Skywalker. It was not, Luke reminded himself, catching sight of Rey navigating the periphery of the crowd, Finn at her side, finished with him.  No, not yet. The Force wasn’t only interested in lonely kids hungering for adventure and glory. The Force had a way of dragging you back in just as you came to realize how high a price that glory commanded. As Rey, hands trembling but eyes steady, had offered him the lightsaber that had shaped his life and his father's before him, he'd felt as if he'd slipped sideways back through time, seeing events long past play out through another set of eyes. In that moment, he had been Old Ben settling back in his chair in his home on the other side of the Dune Sea. R2-D2 played a message from a Princess, the living shadow of a dead Queen, as a young boy looked on with eyes wide and excited, dreaming of worlds beyond the sand.  

The story never ends, it just evolves, paging through an endless cast of thousands.

Hope. Luke had never fully appreciated the burden he had placed on his sister that night on Endor, not until the Force had passed it back to him.

* * *

Rey feels something shift slightly within her.   Once upon a time she would have said that the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.  Now she knows better.  She turns her head and there at the back of the hall are silvery figures, flickering in the doorway.  She’s never seen them before but somehow, deep inside, she knows who they are. 

* * *

The ceremony is brief.  In what feels like no time at all, the bier, covered by the Starbird of the Rebel Alliance, is lifted and carried out through an honor guard that runs down the entire aisle and out the door.  Music, ebullient and powerful, burning like a flame reborn from the exhaust of a beat up spacecraft erupting into lightspeed, rings out loud and clear.  The room stands to attention and as the procession makes its way out onto the main landing pad, a formation of x-wings flies overhead.  At that signal, a battalion raises their blasters to the sky and fires off a salute. Almost in unison. The Resistance is still a little rough around the edges when it comes to precision drilling. 

After a moment of silence, the crowd disperses, hurrying back to ships.  It’s dangerous for this many Resistance sympathizers to be in one place this long. 

Leia is carried onto the Millennium Falcon with R2-D2, and C-3PO flanking her bier, ever her sentinels, her oldest confederates.  Chewie and Luke are the last to board, joining the droids in silent vigil. They are all that is left of Leia’s family.  Rey sets the course for the planet of Luke’s choice.  He’s picked somewhere out of the way to set up a pyre, burn her body in the way of the Jedi.  Rey’s never been to Tatooine but even on Jakku it was considered a poverty entrenched backwater, albeit one with a bit more dangerous allure and raffish spice. Luke wasn't kidding when he described it as the “planet farthest from the bright center of the universe.”  

He’s picked it for exactly that reason . It’s remote, it still lacks an entrenched First Order presence, and it is something of a Skywalker home.  Not so much for Leia but no one place was ever really home for her once Alderaan was gone.  Maybe that was one reason why she and Han managed to stay together as long as they had (which admittedly, never spanned particularly long stretches of time), they were both nomads, following the next mission, the next hustle, the next job.  R2-D2 chirps fondly and C-3PO says brightly as they glide into orbit, “Well, at least some things never change.”  Rey didn't know that droids could be ironic.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where Leia's ashes are finally scattered, they will always find their way back to the stars.

They land before the setting of the twin suns and build her pyre.  Tatooine is a desert waste at the edge of all that is known, where nothing ever really changes. It is a place of beginnings, of cyclical returns. Perhaps, then, it is perfect for this rite.  

Hours later, Luke sets the pyre aflame and they watch silently, as the body burns in the night.

* * *

R2-D2 is old, ancient by the measure of his kind. For all that their metal and polymer  components are sturdier than flesh, they are quickly driven to obsolescence, too soon ravaged for scrap and callously discarded. But R2-D2 is a survivor who has scraped out a place amongst fighters and instigators and those too tenacious to die. That he continues to outlive those fierce, stout lives is a continuous source of surprise and if he's honest, dismay, a vestigial dissonance in his code that still prioritizes human life over his own. As his photo-sensors adjust to the flickering light cast by the pyre, R2-D2 recalls another funeral. His memory banks acquire the image of a handmaiden, a queen, a rebel, a diplomat who sowed the first seeds of the Alliance that saved the galaxy.  She had carried the hope of millions, in more ways than one. She had loved and fought and burned for love and fought until she could no more. 

He remembers a boy too, ambitious, beloved, passionate, who had hungered for adventure, for control, who had longed to follow the path of righteousness but had burned too brightly, and loved too fiercely. A boy, alone, denied, homesick, out of place, frightened of himself and of the boundless capacity for darkness he saw in others. A boy who could never afford to trust, but who in the end, was too easily seduced and manipulated, too desperate to crush the fear inside himself. Who destroyed everything for a chance at being the brightest sun in the galaxy and instead became a supernova. R2-D2 had not been present for Anakin's pyre. None had but one. 

R2-D2 remembers two infants. The first, a boy spirited away by a mystic to the sands of this very planet. Given into the care of relatives who raised him out of basic decency and a sense of familial duty, no matter how estranged. Values they passed on to that boy, now himself a mystic standing in the sandy wastes of Tatooine, watching as his sister’s sun sets one last time. 

His sister, the second child, a rambunctious girl, opinionated, a force to be reckoned with.  A teenager, brilliant, insightful, frustrated with the intractability and the gutlessness of the adults around her.  A woman who made the galaxy listen. Who had grown into the bright sun Anakin could never quite become. 

R2-D2 is old, ancient by the measure of his kind. Astromech droids were never intended to be tellers of tales and keepers of custom and lore, nor were they meant to be divulgers of intel, of secrets. They were meant for utilitarian purposes and companionship, easily disposed of, easily replaced. No one bothered to wipe their memories when circumstances called for it, as C-3PO’s had been. Nobody looks to the Astromechs to chronicle the sagas of times long ago, in galaxies far, far away. Which is precisely why R2-D2 will never forget as long as the circuits in his body still fire. 

Astromechs aren’t supposed to feel pain either. But R2-D2 has never been one to follow the rules.  

* * *

Rey feels a quickening in the Force, as another life is returned to stardust, a pulse of energy in the great hum of the universe, strengthening the fabric of existence itself. It seems fitting. After all, Leia was the first person who ever blessed her with the words

“May the Force be With You.”

Rey hadn’t known Leia long but she feels the transcendence of her presence as deeply as others may feel the void of her absence. 

She slides through sense memories of another in other times and places – the heft of a blaster, the scratch of tree branches whizzing by, the weight of losing those she was responsible for, the exhilarating, panic-soaked smell of the Millennium Falcon, vigil fires, the thrill of being on the run, a low chuckle that pulled at her heart, a family found amidst a kinetic life, the resolve to never take anything sitting down and to alwaysbring a fight to those who dared threaten the freedom and stability of the galaxy.  

As dawn breaks and the fire dies down, Rey feels these borrowed memories ebb away, pulled by the tide and reclaimed by a greater sea. In its absence, she sags in the growing presence of her own exhaustion.  

Leia is one with the Force, the Force is with her. 

* * *

A few days after the funeral, Poe passes by Lieutenant Connix sitting on a container in the corner of the comms room of a temporary base, hidden in the caves of Lah’mu. Everything is cold, damp, and muddy, the skies a bleak grey against the black sands and sparse grassy outcrops. It looks the way everyone feels.

She’s barely spoken since she got the news of the General’s death. She’s hollowed-eyed and staring at nothing, her new blaster holstered at her belt. The General traveled light and didn’t have much to bequeath. But she had written specifically that the blaster was to be left to Connix.  It’s small, with a grip of carved, polished bantha tusk.  It’s flashier than the General usually preferred but it was a gift, and packs a mean punch.  Has one hell of a kick from what Poe has heard so the bequest speaks volumes about Connix’s marksmanship. 

He isn’t entirely certain of Connix’s origins but she’s been in this fight for awhile, shadowing the General for most of it.  She is well thought of and shows strong leadership potential. Right now though, she looks very young. Then again, Poe reminds himself as he nervously edges his way over to her, the General had been even younger when she first took command. 

“Um, Lieutenant? I just…the General used to talk about you sometimes.  She thought you’d probably be running your own unit in a few years.” It’s true.  She had said it, though perhaps not in Connix’s hearing. 

“She was proud of you.”

Lieutenant Connix looks up at him then.  There is yawning grief in her eyes but behind them is steel. 

“I know.”  She says. “I know.” 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you hear in your head the exact music I am referencing for the funereal recessional. 
> 
> Carrie Fisher, drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra. May the Force be with you. Always.


End file.
